The first (and last) time I watched Doctor Gore must've been a decade ago during one of the first H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. parties. Since we had just recently been molested by the hands of bad movies (with their hairy knuckles and dirty fingernails), we knew little about the flicks we rented for these parties beyond their awesome titles and the synopsis on the VHS sleeves. We had a buffet of untouched exploitation and cheesy gore porn before us and I remember that Doctor Gore actually garnered quite a reception in Jim's basement... which was much warmer than Mike's barn... and lacked the annoyance of Chad's attic with his little brother and sister... though Jim's basement did smell of mold and nacho cheese... no wonder everybody got so sick after spending entire weekends down there! Can you imagine how the moldy nacho cheese germs must've had a field day raping and pillaging our immune systems, diminished by lack of sleep and having already been kicked around by gallons of caffeine and snacks high in saturated fat?! It's no wonder we all wound up with some kind of miserable physical ailment years later...

But, putting the slot car back on track, as soon as Doctor Gore's oddball title music hits, I can almost smell the moldy nacho cheese and the plastic of old VHS tapes again. I can hear Mike and Pete yelling at each other. I can see Jim covered in garbage because he fell asleep first. George is wearing a pit helmet and making inappropriate advances on a stuffed sheep. I'm riffing about Pumpkinhead 2 between violent bouts of pretzel flavored vomit. Ah, H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S., how I miss those days. But that's the past and this is the present and 2099 is the future, so let's focus on the flick.

Doctor Donald “Thighmaster” Brandon (writer-director J.G. Patterson Jr., billed as "Don Brandon the No.1 Magician in the World") is a prominent scientist and plastic surgeon who lives in a sleepy community with his lovely wife Anitra “Purple Nurple” Brandon, who was a beauty queen and pin-up model... before dying horribly in a car accident. Oh well, now she can pose for HeadSickPinUps.com. Tell 'em tombofanubis.com sent you! If Dr. Don's internal monologue at Anitra's funeral is any indication though, it doesn't look as if Anitra will be staying in the ground for very long. Hopefully when he does the inevitable Herbert West thing, he'll be able to convince Anitra to change her damn name...

Proving that he's a mad scientist first and a plastic surgeon second, Dr. Brandon lives in an old castle(!?) and has a hunchbacked henchman (which I guess you could call his “henchback”). Unlike most mad scientists who name their hunches stuff like “Igor” or “Fritz”, Don's associate is named “Greg”. That's right, he's just Greg. Greg the grave digging, cigar chomping minion who speaks with indecipherable grunts and looks like a bushy extra from Braveheart with a rugby ball stuffed under the back of his shirt. Also known as Greg: the greatest character in the history of movies. I love Greg. I want to be Greg. Greg for President. Go Greg go.

Dr. Brandon's plan is to create a perfect patchwork woman (ala Bride of Frankenstein or Pieces) by taking different “flawless” parts from a variety of victims. One of the ladies he receives C.O.D., presumably (because it's NEVER EXPLAINED) from Don's mafia connections since she's delivered in a trunk, tied up, tape over her mouth, and her throat slit. When your corpses need to get where they're going before decomposition starts to set in, trust FedEx! The other girls who wind up in the doc's chop shop are victims of the Don Monster's smooth operator pimp style (his freaky-eyeball hypnosis power doesn't hurt either), as he picks up several honeys who apparently have a thing for old, pale, balding, out-of-shape weirdos, only to mutilate the pretty young things later. So, what it really comes down to is that Don loved Anitra, just not enough that he wouldn't prefer to bring her back from the dead wearing hotter chicks' body parts... and covered with surgical scars...

About an hour in, Dr. Brandon brings his deceased human quilt of a wife back to life, but her brain functions, well, ain't functioning. Despite this, he also makes sure to hypnotize her into an absolute blank slate for some reason, then begins to re-teach her everything about herself and the world... of which sex will no doubt be realllllly awkward, but at least she'll think that whatever he does is the right way... not unlike when 25 year olds pick up high school girls and marry them as soon as they turn 18 so they'll never know that sex can last longer than 5 minutes and doesn't require alcohol, violence, or 20 minutes of crying. In order for his re-education to work, Don has to keep Anitra (damn it, that name sounds like an erectile dysfunction drug!) locked up in his castle, away from all other humanity including Greg, whom he bans from leaving the basement. Poor Greg, forced to sit in the basement all day and night, sucking down whiskey with a random rabbit as his only friend/lover. I feel for ya Greg.

Teaching his brain dead wife that her existence as a woman revolves around pleasing him as a man proves to be worse than just slavery and chauvenism though, when Anitra wanders into the basement one day and starts gropin' up all over our friend Greg. Enraged, Dr. B throws acid into the poor little freak's face like he were a hunchbacked Muslim woman asking her husband for a divorce! Greg then makes the mistake of falling on a breakaway prop table and crawling a little too close to the tub of acid, where the jealous Don plants a surgical cleaver into the poor misfit's hump and pushes him head first into painful, flesh melting oblivion. So long Greg, may a flight of hunchbacked angels sing thee to thy rest and 37 virgins forever be there to rub exotic oils on your hump.

Dr. Brandon's downfall happens soon after when he makes the mistake of calling an ash collector to come over and clear out his fireplace while he goes out to run errands. Of course Anitra lets the obese ash man in and she ends up leaving with him because as a woman it's her sole purpose in life to satisfy men. Don winds up in an asylum (we have no idea how) making passes at the cleaning lady while Anitra eventually wanders away from the fat ass ash collector and gets picked up hitchhiking by some doofus in thick rimmed glasses driving a van with a smashed in passenger side door held on by duct tape, in which the duo drive off into the sunset... and, uhm, I guess that's how it ends? Yeah, there's the credits, so I guess it's over. Huh, what d'ya know?

The movie is pure madness and you can't help but laugh while watching such scenes as Dr. Brandon and Greg preparing for their next experiment by duct taping a giant tin foil shroud over a lady exhumed from the local boneyard, or when Dr. B tells Greg to put a coat on when answering the door “so they won't know you're a hunchback”, or just the always confusing '60s-'70s live musical interlude scene featuring Bill Hicks and the Rainbow singing their bottom 100 hit, “A Heart Dies Every Minute”. I love it when a bad movie knows how bad it is and isn't afraid to whip it out like that in front of everybody. Sometimes the most laid back type of humor is the funniest and this is one of those times.

My only problem with Doctor Gore is that there's no glue to hold all of his delightfully broken pieces together. The movie has very little in the way of story, 10 of the last 20 minutes are dedicated to cheesy music video type scenes of Don and Anitra frolicking, and for a good (as in “sizable” not as in “of high quality”) chunk of the first hour you get this feeling that you're just watching a clipshow made entirely of poorly trimmed scenes involving two guys puttering around their mad science lab. Sure, occasionally Don and Greg leave to pick up more victims, and at the 50 minute mark there's a scene where a local sheriff comes to the door to question Don about if he's been brewing moonshine in his basement (which fondles the funny bone because the entire scene cuts back and forth between shots of the cop filmed during broad daylight and scenes of Dr. Brandon talking out of his front door where it's clearly night outside), but it always comes right back to the lab for another 10 minute segment of Don and Greg dismembering bodies, putting the pieces into storage, tweaking their dials, doing maintenance on the machines, and dumping the waste body parts into a tub of bubbling acid... which goes flat about 30 minutes in.

If you didn't know any better, you'd think that Doctor Gore were an H.G. Lewis creation, based on it's title, poor cinematic assembly, and sequences of no-budget bloodletting. Looking at the writer-director-makeup artist's name, you might imagine that “J.G. Patterson Jr.” could easily be an alias for one “H.G. Lewis” as well... until you saw that the same guy also played the star, at which point you'd realize that no amount of special effects makeup could turn H.G. Lewis into J.G. Patterson. Your comparison would in no way be unfounded though, because the ultimate achievement of Patterson's life looks, feels, and smells like a Lewis concoction. It makes sense too, considering Patterson himself actually assisted, associate produced, and even acted on a handful of the Gorefather's creations! I doubt anybody could work around a guy like Lewis and not get some kind of brain parasite that would cause them to make their own nickel and dime “blood & tits” production. As such, you could consider Doctor Gore to be akin to something like Son of Blood Feast... (cue the Riff Raff sound byte) “In spirit, anyway”. Mr. Herschel Gordon even did an intro for the movie's original VHS release, which you can check out by clicking the rolling head below.

I'm still not 100% on whether Mr. Patterson intended Doctor Gore to be the comedy it turned out to be. For the sake of his memory (which isn't much since the guy died not long after finishing his opus) I hope it was intentionally a pile of crap. If it's a fake dog turd from a joke store then it's funny, but if I stepped into a pile of real sidewalk pudding, well then, boo to J.G. Patterson and I'm glad that he's dead. There, I said it, it's out there. For now though I'm going to chalk it up as an intentional gore comedy that thrives on its subtle humor and could've been a solid four star flick with a little more story and some much better editing. Thanks Mr. P, you did more good to the world with one movie than most politicians, if for no other reason than because you gave the world Greg.